In these lean times, we've all become bargain hunters of one kind or another. In the trade-off between quality and cost, we're looking even harder for the very best value we can find.

As it came time for our annual look at executive compensation in Silicon Valley, that got me wondering which CEOs were the best bargains for their companies last year.

There's no simple way to rank CEO pay in terms of value, because the term is inherently subjective. The size of the company obviously plays a big role in setting the level of pay. But so do the circumstances. Is the company in turnaround? Is it king of the hill? Context matters.

So I tried to take those ideas into account. On top of that, I looked at several other factors: amount of pay, change in net income, change in stock price. The last one is particularly tricky, since the stock markets got whacked last year.

With all that in mind, here are the three CEOs who I thought were the best bargains in Silicon Valley last year, and why:

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. This might have been the easiest call. Looking at a big matrix of data, his name just about leaps right off the page.

Let's start with his total pay package in 2008: $2,760,853. That ranks him at No. 60 among CEOs who run the top 150 companies. Don't cry too much for Hastings, as he's cashed out

$67.9 million in Netflix stock over the past five years, which should keep him off the streets.

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But Netflix turned in an absolutely ridiculous year in 2008. In the face of an economic slump, the company saw profit jump 24 percent, and its stock price climb 12.3 percent. And among the intangibles, the company continued to finesse the transition to digital streaming of movies while also taking advantage of favorable trends such as the declining costs of advertising to reduce the cost of attracting new customers.

Put it all together, and in Hastings I'd argue that Netflix probably got the best bargain in the valley.

Steven Berglund, CEO of Trimble Navigation. The Sunnyvale company makes GPS and other navigation products that it sells to big business customers. Even with the downturn hitting in the fourth quarter, the company posted an 8.7 percent increase in revenue and a 20.5 percent increase in profit last year.

Its stock price still suffered, dropping 28.5 percent in the calendar year. But its stock performance still earned it a ranking of 19 on Forbes' list of mid-cap stocks in 2008. That list measures stock performance, which means that despite the drop, it did pretty well compared with most companies its size.

For all this, Berglund had a pay package of $2.4 million. That ranks him at No. 66 and represents an increase of 9 percent from the previous year.

Jagdeep Singh, CEO of Infinera. Last year marked the first full calendar year as a public company for the Sunnyvale maker of optical-networking products. The company squeaked out the door in June 2007 before the IPO market collapsed.

The company posted its first profit last year as revenue doubled, though that didn't prove convincing enough for investors, as the stock dropped 39.6 percent.

Still, the company continues to gather momentum under the leadership of Singh, a widely respected figure in his industry. Singh also has a good track record on pay. The year his company went public, he was the second-highest-paid employee at Infinera, leaving top honors to his vice president of sales.

Last year, Singh had a pay package of $2.06 million, placing him at No. 82 among CEOs on the list. That's a bargain for a guy who built a company during a decade when the telecom sector seemed moribund and now has Infinera poised for big things.

Honorable mentions: Steve Jobs of Apple; Eric Schmidt of Google. In many ways, either or both of these guys deserve to be in the top three. Jobs was paid a total of $1. Schmidt's pay package was $508,764, but all but $1 was for his personal security and trips on which family or friends joined him. Even though both companies saw their stock prices take big hits in 2008, their profits continued to rise.

So why didn't I put them on the list? Well, they're both fantastically rich to start, so they can afford to take a pass on additional compensation. And their companies entered the year dominating their respective industries, and managed to climb a bit higher during the year.

They could easily demand more, but they didn't. More than just bargains, they're both setting an example we can only hope that more of their peers will follow in the coming years.